A Life in Ink

 It took Edith years to find what she wanted. And, in the end, she found it was exactly the opposite of what she thought she did. She thought she wanted romance, mystery, adventure. Maybe children along the way, or years of thoughtful marriage. She had dreams of photography, traveling the world, and unplanned spontaneity. After all, it had been what she was known for.  

 But it was only years later, after her joints started cracking and stopped wanting to carry out her wild exhibitions that she was forced to stop running and find herself. And she found it in the form of a 1948 Quiet De Luxe.  

 From anybody else’s point of view, every single day after she found that typewriter looked the same. She would wake up promptly at exactly 6:30 every morning, get dressed, and eat the same breakfast of eggs, toast, and Tabasco. She would walk outside, hastily yank up any flowers that grew in her patch of weeds, (she liked them better than flora anyway), and chase away the neighbor's cat with her broom (it really was a pest). The neighborhood kids thought she was a witch. She liked to keep it that way.  

 Then she would walk back inside her very large and very antiquated stone house, and sit in the room with her desk. When she first got to doing this, the neighbors simply thought she was working, and since the study was within very clear view of the street, it was quickly revealed to them that she was not. In fact, she wasn’t doing anything. Yes, she sat at her desk, the old typewriter perched hopefully in front of her, but all she would do was stare at it, sometimes looking up to stare someplace else, but always returning her thoughtful gaze to its polished keys.  

 When the three hours were up, she would get up and leave the house, going into the small-town center and running errands, the rest of her day as normal as her nosy neighbor’s. The odd thing was, she would do the exact same thing every day, like her routine was the only thing left for her to hold onto. And that it was.  

 It had taken her too long to realize that she was meant for a simple life, that her hunger for mystery and adventure could be satisfied by her own interpretation of her world. In fact, it had taken her exactly $52 dollars plus the money for the spare ribbon to realize this. The few who noticed wondered why exactly she never wrote a thing, besides it playing into their witch theories. But it was not the typewriter itself, but rather what it represented that really mattered to her. It represented entire worlds, both ones she had visited, and ones she had not, and adventures she could never have anywhere else. It represented youth. But she never wrote. She only sat there, letting her mind wander at the possibilities, creating story lines and characters, revisiting people she once knew, remaking the past.  

 She never let herself even hope that any of what she created would be good enough for the beautiful machine in front of her.  

* 

March  

It was March 21st when her world shifted. In the morning, she opened her fridge to find that her headache yesterday had impeded her shopping ability, therefore limiting her to only one egg with her breakfast. When in her “garden” she found a very stubborn rose that just happened to be in full bloom growing in the very lovely dandelion patch she had cultivated. When she went to shoo the pesky cat away, she found that he had apparently learned his lesson and was now avoiding her yard. This was all too much for her, so naturally she was in a state by the time she entered her study, the sun shining in a way she thought too obtrusive for the moody green wallpaper. But at the sight of the typewriter, she felt the soothing calm spread over her, causing her to relax as she sank into a deep-  

Thud. The sound of something hitting the window jarred her out of her meditative state, and her irritation returned. She looked out of the window to find that a hummingbird, just a miniscule ball of feathers, was lying under the sill, having apparently hit the glass. She opened the window to scoop the thing up, and was surprised to find its tiny chest was still rising and falling.  

 It was only later that she realized it is the small things in life that have the power to really change us.  

* 

April 

 She stared at its body, so much stiller than it was a month ago, the limp thing striking her as rather paradoxical, representing something as dark as death, yet looking the exact opposite. Maybe it was just ironic. Its tiny wings were folded neatly by its sides as it lay on her desk, curled feet nearly touching the typewriter. She hadn’t really thought about it since the hummingbird had flown into the glass of her study. She had been too busy trying to keep the thing alive. Clearly, she had failed. As she gazed down upon its tiny body, she had the urge to do something about it. Not just to get it off of her desk before it started to smell, but to give it a real burial. She felt like a child, but everyone already thought she was crazy. It deserves more than just dirt, she thought. It deserves something special. Without thinking, she placed a blank sheet of paper into the carriage and started typing a eulogy.  

* 

May 

She hadn’t touched the typewriter since. One step at a time, she told herself. She was only capable of so much change. She had already added visiting the tiny grave to her routine, which was otherwise completely the same, minus the cat. Every afternoon, she still sat and stared, thinking about more important things this time, like what she could have done to stop it from dying. It bothered her, to think that there was something she could have done to save it. But it didn’t bother her for the reasons one might think. It bothered her because it reminded her of others she could not save.  

 Usually about now, the dam she had built would close its doors, slamming shut and blocking all the memories from rushing toward her and flooding her conscious. But it did not do so fast enough. Names and faces slipped by, ones she had refused to acknowledge in years. It pained her, to be reminded of the things she had lost, but remembering them reminded her of the tiny fluttering wings that she had held in her hand; so fragile and broken, but beautiful all the same. She loaded the second piece of paper she had ever typed on, and pressed the keys so they formed names. Not the name she wanted, but names all the same.  

* 

July 

 It had taken her two months to get through all the names. It was hard for her, to see them in print, to admit, if only to herself, that they used to be very real. It kept her busy, and she would often abandon her schedule to rush to the typewriter when she remembered something about them that she had forgotten. She wrote about everyone she could think of, from her parents to her school teachers, to the children across the street. Even the hardest ones: her first love, her sister, her best friend. Pages of typos and misspelled words were stacked on her once empty desk, evidence of her haste. She didn’t know what deadline she was working towards, but there seemed to be a clock in the back of her head that drove her need to record everything exactly as she remembered before she forgot it again. She wasn’t happy, exactly, but she was busy, and that was good enough.  

* 

October 

 Her joints were getting worse. Plunking down the keys was turning out to be a bit of a chore, as thoughts often were lost in the moments between her mind and the paper. At least now, she felt free to write. She felt she could finally type freely, having given what was due. The pages of memories were still growing, as she remembered bits and pieces of the things she had repressed. She wrote the stories that had been running through her head, the characters that she had created since childhood. The only door still locked was the one only she had a key to.  

 She wasn’t sure if her story would sound better on paper, or if the horrors would bleed out of it, oozing crimson ink. Maybe she had been silent too long. The first word was easy. It was the thousands after that bothered her.  

* 

January 

 She couldn’t type. Her fingers were stiff now, brittle and sore. She hated the feeling, not because of the pain, but because it meant the comfort she had only just found would be taken away from her. Writing her story had taken her exactly three months, her throbbing joints slowing her pace that would have otherwise been quick now that her routine only consisted of writing. The neighbor boy typed for her now, but it felt intrusive, not just because it wasn’t her, but because he had refused to use the typewriter, and now her precious memories were contained to a physical, breakable thing. He said it would be easier, if she were to want to publish it. She had waved him away, but the seed was planted.  

* 

February 

 The envelope was right there. Sitting on her desk, an orange manilla folder fat with words. Her words. Her story. She wondered if she would be able to make it to the post office to mail it, her sore knees as bad as ever. She could make one of the young-ins do it, they didn’t fear her as much now that they knew she wasn’t a witch, and aside from the fact there was no guarantee that it would make it to the final destination with them, she felt this was something she needed to do herself.  

 When she slid the package into the slot, she felt the weight of all her memories lift a little. It is nice, she thought, having someone else share the pain. Maybe if everyone took a little bit, there wouldn’t be so much hurt. Now she just had to wait to see if anybody was willing to.  

* 

March 

 She was staring at the letter. Since she had refused to correspond by email, which most likely put her at the bottom of the list of candidates for publishers, she had gotten a response by mail. It looked too ordinary to hold any of the answers she was hoping—and dreading—for. The paper knife shook in her hands, but not from her arthritis. When she shakily got the letter open, and pulled out the paper, she skimmed the typed words.  

 Hello, Edith. I was pleased to receive your work. Your writing offered a slightly different perspective than we’re used to, but the plot is creative. I could see this is an idea of great potential, and is well-written, but at the end falls flat. I was disappointed by the lack of an ending, or the two-dimensional one you offered. You tried too hard to wrap it up in the end, like the characters had to have a happy ending. I would suggest revising this to sound more real. You said you wrote from personal experience? I say let that influence your work. Write how it really ended.  

 Hope to hear from you in the future.  

Sincerely,  

Jen Cooke 

 She didn’t notice she was crying until she felt the warmth run down her cheek. Write how it really ended. This is how it ended. It ended with her here, all alone, an old woman who stares at her typewriter thinking of how life could have been because she was too weak to change it while it was happening. It ended with them dead and her stuck here. It wasn’t the ending she wrote. But maybe the truth was better; maybe somebody would learn from her mistakes. 

 And so, she forced her sore hands to type, slowly and painfully, like everything that she had done. She re-wrote her ending exactly as it had happened, except on paper, she felt braver, stronger. She didn’t let go, and eventually, she got her ending. It may not have been the one she wanted, but it was the truth, and that was better.